Why you need to be active on social media sites

I’m scrolling through my list of contacts on Biznik, because I want to write some compliments for people, but something else has caught my eye. On Biznik, it will tell you when your connections were last active on the site. And as I look at my contacts, I see people who haven’t been on the site for months or in some cases, over a year. It makes me wonder why they’re on the site. I’m also not going to write a compliment for them, because I don’t even know if they’ll notice.

The reality of small business owners is they only have so much time and as such can only commit so much to social media as well. When working with my clients I tell them they should only take on what they can commit to consistently. They don’t need to be on social media sites all day, but they do need to be consistent about being active on those sites. If they aren’t consistent, it can raise questions as to whether they’ll be consistent in other avenues. The reason for that is simple: Social media is public and as such if I want to learn about you, I’ll check the sites I know you’re on to learn about you. But if I see that you haven’t been active on that site, it will tell me that the information is outdated, and also make me wonder why you still have a presence on a site you’re not on.

My rule for social media sites is that if I find I’m not spending a lot of time on those sites, it’s better to close my account and focus my efforts on the sites where I’ll actually spend time. This way if people are looking for information about me, they’ll find me on sites where I’m active and can get an updated snapshot of my activities and what I’m doing. This will help them decide if they want to contact me, and also show them that I’m someone they can reliably contact.

Remember that making social media work for you means being consistently active on the sites that you’re using. Don’t visit a site just to set up a profile and then not do anything with it. While it might be good for your Search Engine optimization in the short term, it may not be as a good in terms of the first impression people form about you and your business. You don’t need to be on every social media site to make an impression. You just need to be consistent on the ones you actively use…and that activity will help your SEO and the impression you make.

As an aside note, it was interesting to observe that the people who are most active on Biznik are the people who are paying for an account.